XVI.

THE FAREWELL

“_Mummy was surprised_,” she wrote to Frank from Ireland a few days later, “_at the many underclothes you’ve given me. But when I said it was a parting gift on account of my going away to Rome and Paris with de Jones, she said it was all right. As for de Jones, Darling, I am Furious; I told him all. And He is Furious. I told him all the Truth that I never went on his errand to Edinborough University but spent the day with you in London as well as the money He’d given me for Travelling Expenses on sweets and things. And He says he is going to dismiss me. Never mind, if I’ll flirt with Him he won’t dismiss me. And I said to him that you bought me a box of chocolates before you left, and a little book of poems to read in bed. ‘Oh,’ says He, ‘that is a Consolation!’ I shall be in London all next week, packing. We leave on Friday morning. Shall wait for you on Thursday at Paddington at Eleven Sharp. It will be our last day together._

_Your Eva._”

But she was not there at eleven. She was not there at twelve. As he paced up and down he was conscious that all the porters and the waiting taxi-cab drivers looked at him with interest. Shameless flag vendors buttonholed him with pertinacity. He paced on, angry and exhausted, his thick heavy overcoat on his arm, and a small fly flew straight into his ear; and pacing up and down vehemently he stepped again onto some slippery nastiness on the pavement. “Must tell Ottercove,” he made a mental note of it. “Have this scandal ventilated in the House.” At one o’clock he went into the station bar and drank a glass of beer on an empty stomach, and suddenly he took courage, ceased to be concerned about the formidable mass opinion of the porters on the subject of himself, saw them as mere independent, ignorant at that, individuals. The movement of the traffic, the sight of a girl stepping into a coach and revealing a ripening, silk-stockinged leg--such sights and sounds began to work on him, till his mind, with the beer and the oxygen inhaled, hummed like music, and saw God.

“Well--!” he said; and then again: “Well--!”

“Why, darling, what has happened?”

The presence of John emphasised her crime and irritated him unspeakably. “You ask me; you--you--you ask me--” He could not continue. He cast an accusing look at the brother, who giggled bashfully.

“Zita said I must take John about with me and show him London for he is so shy and it’s his last day, you know. To-morrow he is going on a farm in Ireland. ‘And,’ says she, ‘you’ve only one young brother.’”

“And what of her? It’s our last day together.”

“Exactly! But she wants to be alone with Pilling all the time. How she loves Pilling!”

“And why aren’t you wearing the nice new clothes I gave you?”

“Child: it won’t do.”

“It won’t do?”

“No, child.”

While John was looking into a shop window, Frank pleaded with her whether they could not really spend this last day alone.

“I will telephone to her,” said Eva, as if struck by a brain-wave, “and see what she says.”

She vanished in a telephone box, and Frank and John watched her mute lips through the glass door assiduously explaining into the telephone what looked a difficult, and at the other end an uncongenial, proposition.

“No,” she said, emerging from the box, “she says John must come with us, because he is so shy and would lose himself alone in London. ‘You have only one little brother,’ she said.”

“This is damnable,” thought Frank. “At any rate let us go and have lunch somewhere,” he said aloud, “and think it over.”

They lunched in embarrassed silence, broken here and there by an embarrassed question. “You crossed over when?”

“Tuesday. Arrived in London very late, so went to a hotel. Travelled with nine Catholic priests,” she said, “so all went to the same hotel, and to the Cinema together, and we all held hands.”

“Nine Catholic priests, and you in the middle?”

“No, at one end. Father Michael and I holding hands, and all the other eight, too, in a chain. Very intriguing.”

“Must have been.”

After lunch, as they were sauntering along, an idea occurred to Frank. “John,” he said, “would you like to go to a theatre--by yourself?”

“Fancy! all by yourself like a grown-up man!” said Eva.

John giggled nervously.

“To a show of Maskelyne and Devant?”

“Fancy!” said Eva. “Acrobats, John! Acrobats and things. Eh? John?”

“I don’t mind,” said John.

They jumped into a taxi, and Frank bought a stall ticket, and John, accepting it with a kind of nervous misgiving, was ushered into the darkness (the performance having already begun), the attendant like a gaoler on his heels. “Tell him, tell him to look after John, who is so shy!” Eva cried. But John and his gaoler had vanished in the dark.

Freedom at last! They were free, free, free; free of all but the exigence of their freedom. He avoided the shops with her, but she must have a bottle of scent and let him buy all that the saleswoman insinuated. She gave in completely to the saleswoman’s idea of what was the proper thing for her. The saleswoman seemed to have no doubt, and appreciating Frank’s secret loathing of her and her sex, made it a point of honour for him to comply with Eva’s tutored wishes.

“And I just want to look at these gowns.”

“Better come out and look at Nature. A lovely day!”

“I’d like that gown.”

“No doubt. I’d like a new suit.”

“Must have another gown to go about with de Jones, you know. In Paris and Rome.”

“I got old Ottercove to stop his payments too soon, it would seem. Too soon, too damned soon!”

“Couldn’t you borrow, perhaps?”

“Couldn’t I!... Women will sell their bodies and souls for a vivid rag,” he said bitterly.

He looked at her and read her thought. With a melancholy twinge, she reflected that she had evidently sold hers without any such extenuating material compensation. “You are an awful old miser,” she said.

He suffered hell. Damn it all, she seemed to have no idea about the value of money! She did not know that the number of pounds in his pocket-book was strictly limited.

Through the Park they drifted into Kensington Gardens and walked across the grass towards the Serpentine. Eva wouldn’t let him take her arm.

“Bad form,” she explained.

They hired a boat, and as he rowed he watched her steer. She steered intently but very badly, zig-zagging needlessly all the way, while he puffed and sweated at the oars; which provoked him into biting sarcasm.

“Crooked again!”

“Why don’t you put it straight with the oars?”

“Can’t you see me,” he said, puffing, “otherwise employed?”

“Now don’t get ratty, darling, or you will feel sorry afterwards.”

“Why sorry?”

“When you think of it--remember, I mean.”

By the time they had rowed back, it was time, she judged, to go and fetch John from the matinée. “If we are not there, he won’t know where to turn to: he is so shy,” she said. “And Zita said to me, ‘Take care of John; you won’t always have your little brother with you.’”

This solicitude on behalf of John angered him. “Damn it all, we thought nothing of leaving him alone at the inn.”

“What inn, darling?”

“On the top of the Patscherkofl mountain in the Tyrol. Don’t you remember?”

Her eyes darkened and lightened again. “I remember, darling, I remember.”

“And it’s our last day together.”

“I am thinking--”

“What?”

“I have no real travelling costume for my Continental trip.”

“I have no proper overcoat, damn you.” Oh, why were there no girls as beautiful as Frances Doble and as intelligent as Henry James!

“Well, John, did you enjoy the performance?”

“Great fun,” stammered John.

“Tell us all about it, John.”

“There was a man,” said John, “and a ring and another man on the ring--”

“That will do, John. Wait till we are settled down in the café,” she said.

“Now then, John.”

“There was a ring and a man held on to the ring and a girl held on to the man and--”

“Wait, John. I was just thinking, if Zita asks me all about the performance I must tell the same story as John.”

“All the more reason why John should be allowed to disclose his impressions,” said Frank.

“Yes. Go on, John.”

“There was a man,” said John, “and a ring--”

“What will you have, John,” she asked, “tea or chocolate?”

On the way home, John talked of the performance. “There was a man,” he would say, “with a ring, and a girl held on to the man.”

“Shut up, John. That will do.”

She went in with John, and Frank said he would wait for her in Kensington Gardens to take her out to dinner. He was tired and glad to be alone. He sat down on a bench, and a nasty little girl of ten or so disengaged herself from a group of urchins and sat down between him and an old lady and began to tease him, pointing at him with her dirty forefinger. “You funny-looking bloke, you. Now why don’t you smile?” and all the other urchins crowded round and giggled at him. “Come on! Let’s see a smile!” the girl went on, encouraged.

The old lady at his side saw fit to intervene. “Behave yourself,” she said, “or go away and leave the gentleman alone.”

“It’s ‘im I’m torking to, not yer; you ‘old yer tongue.”

“Disgraceful girl!” said the old lady. But the little girl went on at Frank:

“Come, show us you can smile. Now then!”

“Shut up, will you!” suddenly Frank roared at her.

The girl went red and shrivelled up on the bench. “It’s ‘er,” she said tearfully, pointing at the old lady, “not me. None of ‘er bloomin’ business.”

One of those nasty winter fogs was descending on to London when Eva, late by an hour, appeared at the gate.

“Is sweet’eart!” jeered the girl, and all the urchins giggled with her.

“Well,” he said, rising, “I _have_ had a time, waiting for you.”

“Zita and Pilling kept me back with their nonsense about my getting de Jones to talk to Ottercove about Pilling’s dancing place. I told them I’d be late and keep you waiting, but Pilling said: ‘Ferdinand will wait.’”

They were rattling along in a taxi, and he was telling her all about the cheeky girl in Kensington Gardens.

“Darling, I am not interested.”

“In anything that happens to me.”

“That isn’t true, darling. When I am away from you I always talk about you. This evening, for example, while you were waiting for me, I asked them if they thought you were very beautiful, but Pilling said: ‘I shouldn’t say he was beautiful to look at, but he is very clever. I wish I had his brains.’”

To Frank, who for years had been regarded as the fool of the family, this universal discovery of his brains was stimulating and refreshing.

At dinner Eva was crotchety because he would not take her out to the Savoy to dance. “It isn’t really at all expensive, darling. It really isn’t. I only want to go so as to tell Zita how you don’t mind throwing away money on me. Because Pilling is so careful, and she hates it so. Only to be able to tell her, you see.”

“Well, tell her.”

“What?”

“Anything you like.”

“H’m. That’s an idea. I never thought of that.”

“Tell her we dined with their Majesties.”

“Zita,” she confided to him, “doesn’t seem to like you much. She said, ‘The one good thing about him is that he has pots of money.’”

“Pots! Barrels full! Brains and money. Beauty, too! Oh, what a lucky man am I! But why is it that I feel I’d like to go and blow my brains out?”

“If you don’t stop quarrelling,” she said, “I will leave immediately, and you will be sorry all your life.”

“Then we shall leave together.”

On their way back he stopped the taxi-cab a few doors away from Pilling’s house and walked on with her into a more deserted lane. They walked in silence. Suddenly it came to him that he might be seeing her for the last time. And what was it that she resented? That he had so far omitted to say the fateful word? He guided her to a sort of blind door in the masonry of a house, and took her in his arms. But a policeman hove in sight and said, “Move on, please. You’re not allowed to stand here.”

They went on and turned into another lane. She hurried him, saying that Pilling and Zita were surely anxious that she was not yet home. It angered him, and at the thought of the last inadequate hours together, full of bickerings and vexations, tears flooded his eyes as he suddenly kissed her good-bye. He stood in the darkness, watching her as she walked to the end of the lane and, without turning to him, disappeared behind the corner.

He walked away at an accelerated pace. He said: “No. Never again. It’s finished as if it had never been! I am glad, and nothing that may come will wipe out the memory of my saying here, deliberately, immediately on parting, that I am glad I did not say the word.” He walked the length of Bayswater-road into Oxford-street and all the way to his club, and on entering his room pulled out his diary and wrote:

“ ... _I put it down on record_....”